Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2 If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
[…] probably be against the civilian population of large cities. It can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population.'(6) Hamilton made a number of proposals for the elimination of large populations, among them ‘fission product aerosols to subject […]
[…] August did not run the story but two other papers that day were dropping big hints. The Sunday Telegraph reported that ‘…a friend of the former MI5 agent told the Sunday Telegraph that there was “concrete evidence” that two senior ministers had worked for the security service…..the same source said that Mr Shayler’s girlfriend, […]
[…] French intelligence, as some kind of wheeze to plant dodgy documents on the Anglo-American alliance and then expose them as fraudulent. See, for example, Bruce Johnston, ‘ Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France’, The Sunday Telegraph 19 September 2004. 7. Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898, July 2004, […]
[…] of a President. HOSTY, James P., Jr. (with Thomas Hosty). Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. viii + 328 pps. Illustrated, index. Hosty, the Dallas FBI agent who destroyed a note from Lee Harvey Oswald on the orders of SAG Gordon Shanklin, here tells his story. Few surprises, good on FBI procedure and […]
Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more
[…] Jo’s Necrophiliac Mafia Montini in Rome? Necro Nader? Chappaquiddick Dickie’s handmaiden Graham? 33rd Degree Masons and Papal Knights – a la Alioto’s Swig? J. Mafia Hoover’s Ex-FBI agent group, featuring Maheu, the assassin at Dallas, Memphis & L.A.?’ Page 187 constitutes the masterpiece of the Gemstone File. Words cannot adequately describe its unsettling aura […]
Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J. K. Villiers (Croom Helm, London, 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they … Read more
